The E-myth Revisited Quotes

“the key is to plan, envision, and articulate what you see in the future both for yourself and for your employees. Because if you don’t articulate it—I mean, write it down, clearly, so others can understand it—”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“In short, businesses that ‘get small again’ die.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Because your managers don’t simply manage people; your managers manage the System by which your business, All About Pies, achieves its objectives. “The System produces the results; your people manage the system. “And there is a Hierarchy of Systems in your business. “This Hierarchy is composed of four distinct components: “The first is, How We Do It Here. “The second is, How We Recruit, Hire, and Train People to Do It Here. “The Third is, How We Manage It Here. “The Fourth is, How We Change It Here.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“a business that ‘gets small again’ is a business reduced to the level of its owner’s personal resistance to change, to its owner’s Comfort Zone,”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The question you need to keep asking yourself is: How can I give my customer the results he wants systematically rather than personally? Put another way: How can I create a business whose results are systems-dependent rather than people-dependent? Systems-dependent rather than expert-dependent.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“understand that there are rules to follow if you are to win: 1. The model will provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, beyond what they expect. 2. The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill. 3. The model will stand out as a place of impeccable order. 4. All work in the model will be documented in Operations Manuals. 5. The model will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer. 6. The model will utilize a uniform color, dress, and facilities code.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“What’s the difference? The commodity is the thing your customer actually walks out with in his hand. The product is what your customer feels as he walks out of your business. What he feels about your business, not what he feels about the commodity.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), accountable for the overall achievement of the Strategic Objective and reporting to the SHAREHOLDERS who include, on an equal basis, Jack and Murray. • Vice-President/Marketing, accountable for finding customers and finding new ways to provide customers with the satisfactions they derive from widgets, at lower cost, and with greater ease, and reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Operations, accountable for keeping customers by delivering to them what is promised by Marketing, and for discovering new ways of assembling widgets, at lower cost, and with greater efficiency so as to provide the customer with better service, reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Finance, accountable for supporting both Marketing and Operations in the fulfillment of their accountabilities by achieving the company’s profitability standards, and by securing capital whenever it’s needed, and at the best rates, also reporting to the COO. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Marketing are two positions: Sales Manager and Advertising/Research Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Operations are three positions: Production Manager, Service Manager, and Facilities Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Finance are two positions: Accounts Receivable Manager and Accounts Payable Manager.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Your Strategic Objective is a very clear statement of what your business has to ultimately do for you to achieve your Primary Aim.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“How can I get my business to work, but without me? • How can I get my people to work, but without my constant interference? • How can I systematize my business in such a way that it could be replicated 5,000 times, so the 5,000th unit would run as smoothly as the first? • How can I own my business, and still be free of it? • How can I spend my time doing the work I love to do rather than the work I have to do?”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“I believe it’s true that the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing. The difference between the two is living intentionally and living by accident.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“How does one come to the point in his or her life when he or she is not only ready but eager and willing—however terrifying the prospect might be—to self-execute such a leap of faith without any guarantees that it will do any good?”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“There is no such thing as undesirable work,” he continued. “There are only people who see certain kinds of work as undesirable. People who use every excuse in the world to justify why they have to do work they hate to do. People who look upon their work as a punishment for who they are and where they stand in the world, rather than as an opportunity to see themselves as they really are.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Accountability literally means “stand up and be counted.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“You might say that, while going to work on the business, people begin to realize that it is a powerful metaphor for going to work on their lives.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The Entrepreneurial Perspective adopts a wider, more expansive scale. It views the business as a network of seamlessly integrated components, each contributing to some larger pattern that comes together in such a way as to produce a specifically planned result, a systematic way of doing business.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“They see the pattern, understand the order, experience the vision. Peter Drucker”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic! “And, besides, that’s not the purpose of going into business. “The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else’s business! But don’t go to work in your own. Because while you’re working, while you’re answering the telephone, while you’re baking pies, while you’re cleaning the windows and the floors, while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“company is started differently than all the rest. A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you. “And because it starts that way, it is more likely to continue that way. And therein resides the true difference between an Adolescent company, where everything is left up to chance, and a Mature company, where there is a vision against which the present is shaped. “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” I said. “The important”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘to become what we truly are.’”1 And”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Drastic change creates an estrangement from the self, and generates a need for a new birth of a new identity. And it perhaps depends on the way this need is satisfied whether the process of change runs smoothly or is attended with convulsions and explosions. Eric Hoffer The Temper of Our Time E”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“To The Entrepreneur, the business is the product.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“I once heard a story about Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. Asked to what he attributed the phenomenal success of IBM, he is said to have answered: IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now,”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“And as the world becomes more and more complex, and the commodities more varied, the feelings we want become more urgent, less rational, more unconscious.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“if living with your spirit, means anything to you at all, if you truly care about it, then guard it with your life. Because Comfort overtakes us all when we’re least prepared for it. Comfort makes cowards of us all.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It